You know, there’s no way to transform someone into an activist without making it personal for them, without making it a selfish issue,” she says. “There’s no way of saying this is something you ought to do for these other people. The only way to make it convincing is to make it personal.
Sarah Schulman, the AIDS activist and historian, has written that the “bold fury” of the ACT UP movement allowed for younger generations to live more ordinary, quiet lives, and that this is the way it should be. It takes some imagination to reconcile the monotony of my shifts with the heroism of the early days: to imagine both the scale of AIDS ripping across New York, and the immense effort, coordination, and risk of jail time it took to distribute syringes.
…
THERE ARE NOW approximately three hundred needle exchanges operating across the US, including those run by more than twenty organizations in New York State. These programs have played an enormous role in lowering and maintaining the city’s rates of HIV in IV drug users, down from the one-in-two rate at the height of the AIDS crisis to just under one in ten.
…
Unlike so many organizations founded around hope or faith, ACT UP is “united in anger.” What toll does extended anger take on a person, on a body?
Allan smiles at me, seeming amused by the question. “I’m more angry than I was in the early ’90s.” Back then, he says, he was learning that the health system didn’t work. Now, with the overdose crisis, he’s seeing that “the system still doesn’t work. We didn’t learn anything from HIV. We have another epidemic.” Glancing up at the wall, where he’s hung photos from demonstrations, Rod’s face among them, he says, “I never really stopped being angry.”
I guess my “luck” has usually been people…
It is an unwritten law of the Navy that facilities must always be locked when they are most needed.
… the trouble with “lessons from history” is that we usually read them best after falling flat on our chins.
This is silly, of course; you don’t win a war by defense but by attack—no “Department of Defense” ever won a war; see the histories.
Girls are simply wonderful. Just to stand on a corner and watch them going past is delightful. They don’t walk. At least not what we do when we walk. I don’t know how to describe it, but it’s much more complex and utterly delightful. They don’t move just their feet; everything moves and in different directions … and all of it graceful.
I had an unsettling feeling that I had been completely mistaken as to the very nature of the world I was in, as if every part of it was something wildly different from what it appeared to be—like discovering that your own mother isn’t anyone you’ve ever seen before, but a stranger in a rubber mask.
… the orders you get aren’t impossible, they merely seem so because they nearly are.
I made a very important discovery at Camp Currie. Happiness consists in getting enough sleep.
Besides, lawyers make notoriously bad husbands, from their habit of incessant prating; whereas your sailor has been schooled to mute obedience,’
No: we are not the sort of men that educated, intelligent, well-brought-up young women cross a thousand miles of sea for. They like us well enough ashore, and are kind, and say Good old Tarpaulin when there is a victory. But they don’t marry us, not unless they do it right away – not unless we board them in our own smoke. Given time to reflect, as often as not they marry parsons, or clever chaps at the bar.’
IN HIS JOURNAL Stephen wrote, ‘At most times the diarist may believe he is addressing his future self: but the real height of diary-writing is the gratuitous entry, as this may prove to be.
‘Oh, I know what o’clock it is,’ said Etherege crossly.
It was clear to a man with far less knowledge of morphology than Stephen possessed that there was nothing under Diana’s gown, and he looked out of the window with a light frown: he wished his mind to be perfectly clear.
uss-edsall
My father told a story about someone he knew who had a housekeeper, who lived with her and wasn’t actually the housekeeper, and it was like “they were just two girls who were good friends living together”
My sister and I together in unison went “they were just roommates”
To which my father paused, looked confused, then comprehension dawned and he went
“Oh. Huh. Hm. They were lesbians.”
